Sammy Sosa & black denial in the DR

A friend and fellow islandista brought our attention to this article from the Miami Herald from back in 2007.

And ... wow!

It certainly gives a lot of perspective on Sammy Sosa's little 'skin rejuvenation' exercise.

We had heard that 'shadeism' was bad in the DR but we did not know it was as bad as all this.

Some excerpts from the piece:


And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.

Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.

"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.





Apparently, part of this goes back to the period that the Dominican Republic was colonised by Haiti.



The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.

Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.


Because of that, few Dominicans actually identify as black, even though their blackness is plain to see.



A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.

To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.

The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."




Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.

"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."

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Islandista who keeps rising - Soledad O'Brien

Everyone wants a piece of Soledad O'Brien.

Seriously.

The famous CNN journalist and Special Investigations host was born in the United States to a black Cuban mother and white Australian father of Irish descent.

Looks simple written there but when you hear that she is a member of both the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and that she has been awarded by the NAACP once,  named as one of 100 Top Irish Americans twice and awarded a prize as Groundbreaking Latina of the Year, you see what we mean.

Everyone - black people, Hispanics, Irish folk, Aussies and yes, now islandistas - proudly stake their bit of a claim to this fabulous islandista by descent.

Yes, we're claiming Soledad too - as a Cubana doing well in the world, she makes us proud to claim her.

Her documentaries are smashes. Both Black in America and Black in America 2 were the most-watched documentaries of the year on CNN in 2008 and in 2009 (so far).

The follow up will be (of course) Latino in America, set to air in October this year.

Could 'Irish in America' and 'Australian in America' be far behind? We kid, we kid...

The story of Soledad's unique, multi-cultural ancestry goes back to John Hopkins University in Maryland in 1958 where interracial marriage was still against the law. That didn't stop Soledad's father Edward, from pestering Estella, the alluring Cubana he saw every day at Mass (both were Catholic).

Solead told Irish Central (of course!):


"As students at John Hopkins in Maryland they used to both go to daily Mass. My father would ask her every day if she would like a ride home, and every day my mother would refuse – you didn’t take a ride from a man you don’t know. But one day she eventually said yes, and that’s how they started dating."


Of course, their dating was severely hampered by segregation - they couldn't go out to most restaurants, bars or even the movies, so Estella cooked for Edward at home. One year later, in 1959, they got married - going to neighbouring Washington D.C. since they could not legally marry in Maryland.

Soledad is well aware that everyone sees a little bit of their culture in her and want to claim her and she's cool with that.

In the interview with Irish Central, she says:


"Every culture sees their own culture in me. I remember my uncle from Australia said, ‘You look so Australian.’ It’s the freckles.

"I look like an O'Brien. If you saw my dad you'd agree. When I was filming Latino in America and I interviewed a wife who was Dominican and her husband who was Puerto Rican and she said, 'I read your mother's Cuban, I knew you were one of us!'

“I love that in the black community that people consider me to be someone who contributes on all fronts."


Her multi-culti background has also helped her very nicely as a journalist, which she owns to.


" There’s something very nice about being an insider and an outsider. As a journalist I think there’s a plus to that. “Whether it’s working moms, or Afro Caribbeans, or Latinos or Irish people or Australians, you can see the inside story and the outside one.”

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NY Fashion week gets it : black is the new black

Let's hope we're not putting our mouth on the fashion industry by speaking too quickly but it finally seems like the message of diversity is getting through to the fashion types. Maybe it's the Obama effect, as the NY Times put it, (or as Tracy Morgan  more succintly put it: "black is the new president, bitch!") but the recently concluded New York Fashion Week was far more colourful than any in recent times.

[caption id="attachment_704" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Islandista Jourdan Dunn was one of the big winners, walking in 20+ shows and opening for both old guard designers such as Oscar de la Renta (pictured) and new guard designer Jason Wu, who famously designed First Lady Michelle Obama's inauguration ball gown"][/caption]

Jezebel did an exhaustive (seriously, that must have been time consuming- really got to large them up for taking the time to go through all of the pics on style.com and break it down- whew!) study of the week and concluded that some 18% of the spots in fashion shows were given to models of colour. Their analysis:

There were 116 labels that held shows at the recently ended New York fashion week; that's 3,697 spots in runway and presentation lineups. Of those, 668 were given to models of color — which, at just over 18%, is 6% better than one year ago. (And certainly better than in the fall of 2007, when WWD reported that one-third of the New York shows used no models of color at all.)

They even did graphs breaking down the race of the models of colour used. Of that number, 41% were black, 36% were Asian and 22% Latina, with 1% being other ethnicities.

While this is no where close to being an accurate representation of the racial composition of the United States, which is 26% non-white, it is encouraging progress so let's give credit where credit is due.

Now, it's on to Milan Fashion Week, which, while known for being very vanilla, also produced the iconic all-black Italian Vogue. So here's hoping...

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